User blog:Eveaustria/Part 3 Overview about the History of HKO (and the HKO-Wikia) in English
'- January 13th 2010:' the user Edyensid stopped contributing after making 98 changes to the HKO-Wikia. Ed had uploaded many pictures, videos and had made nice templates '- January 21st 2010 - January 30th 2010:' the guild-competition-event "Food for Friends 2" was held in HKO to help raising money for Haiti that had been struck by an earthquake. The goal was to cook meals ingame and donate them for Loyalty Points - and for the honor of your player-guild. Afterwards Sanrio Digital donated US$ 18.000 to "Doctors Without Borders" for Haiti. '- February 11th 2010 - February 15th 2010:' the ingame-event "Valentine’s Day Surprise" brought quests for the "Love Bug" and "Cupid" to earn holiday-themed items, as well as an emote-multiplayer-minigame and a cooperative main event on February 15th for "special treats". A new feature made it possible to form teams/groups, useful for a few brand-new group-quests for the event. An old small Tutorial named "Dream Room" from Beta-times was brought back to the game as a playable game-"intro" to teach new players the basic of HKO; extremely simple, strictly linear and a little buggy. '- March 8th 2010 - March 24th 2010:' the latest patches brought daily, weekly and monthly repeatable quests to the Material Merchant NPCs of 3 cities on Sanrio land, and a small change for the targeting-system. The group-feature was now also useful to help other players with building their houses. Upcoming new features and schedules for 2010 were announced by Sanrio Digital; like a revamp of the guild-system scheduled for "summer 2010", changes of the User Interface (more visual indications instead of numbers) and some to the friends list. The "end game" was said to be enhanced later on, a re-balancing of items was announced and more group-quests like during the Valentine's event. Tokyo as a new city map including other adventure-maps and new quests were targeted for release in summer 2010 with sneak previews "in the weeks to come". Other plans included more minigames throughout the game and other new features for "friendly competition" among players, special drops like emoticons and crafting guides through a unique new "system", unique crafting guides that would require special materials for better prices and other improvements to the crafting system. '- March 29th 2010 - April 4th 2010:' the Game Center was implemented into the game HKO. These 30 mini-games have only been available outgame before; by playing those and doing other outgame social activities (like writing emails, blogging, making/rating slideshows, sending greeting cards, playing quizzes, posting at the forums, etc.) you could earn Loyalty Points which were solely needed for buying items at the Item Mall / Cash Shop. Fortunately back then using the Cash Shop wasn't necessary yet for player's progress in the game, even though recently there had been a few optional Valentine's quests based on items from the Cash Shop. '- April 1st 2010:' no April Fools' joke: Burda:IC announced that Sanrio Digital (developer of HKO) would take over the support and hosting for the German HKO-server. All data would therefore "migrate" to China between April 7th and April 15th. Of course the game could not be accessed during these 8 days of transferring. The German Item Mall / Cash Shop was at that point already closed since March 25th 2010 and the players were now told to either give authoriziation to transfer their remaining Cash Points to Sanrio Digital or to request a reimbursement by money transfer to their bank accounts by writing an email to Burda:IC as of April 7th 2010. There was no "official" announcement by Sanrio Digital about all this until April 14th 2010 when the servers had already been down for a week. A "new Beta-phase" was announced to start on April 21st 2010 without giving further details - however at least Burda:IC specified that all items players that had bought via Item Mall / Cash Shop would stay untouched, also emails and player-blogs. A German support was held out in prospect for "later on". '- April 7th 2010 - April 21th 2010:' HKO was down for European players during the transfer / migration to Sanrio Digital. The German forums by Burda:IC with German tutorials, newbie-help, helpful links and the like stayed up until April 21th, but only as an archive - they were closed and even deleted shortly after that. No "automatic" transfer of official announcements or any forum-content between Burda:IC and Sanrio Town ever took place. There had been German forums at Sanrio Town for a long time - they were pretty unhandy and buggy; still they had to do. A further delay of 6 more days was announced by Sanrio Digital on their homepage, although in English only. As everything else from now on. '- April 21th 2010': the German server was "re-opened", now named "Fantasy". From then on Europeans were able to choose freely where to go for each game-session: either to the UK-server ("Wonderful"), the German server or the French server ("Amazing"), as all 3 servers were called "international servers" and were connected. Of course all European players had to patch their game once for an update to the new version of HKO before starting it. A few bugs that came with the transfer had to be worked around, however some of those bugs are still present as of August 2012. Loyalty-Rewards for the European guilds from the event "Food for friends 2" had not been given out despite an according announcement from Burda:IC. Some players even waited until December 2010 until they at last emailed Sanrio Digital personally to claim the Loyalty Points their guilds had won according to the ranking list back at the beginning of the year. The new support by Sanrio Digital (still mostly voluntaries who worked for free) consisted of only a few selected former GMs, most of them had cooperated with Aeriagames prior to that. There was always a GM online at the Dream Carnival, but only ever an English speaking one - as it still is of today in 2012. Only rarely a German-speaking GM would show up for a short while but then stopped appearing altogether. All this was very unfortunate for (mostly young) players whose English was lacking. A virtual NPC-card-collection was one of the more remarkable new features among smaller changes - every NPC would automatically show up as a card in there after adressing it once. Also a whole new introduction world-zone called "Dream Carnival" with lots of quests, new mobs and items was implemented as a Beta-test-version into HKO; however it was and still is only accessible for freshly created player-characters. After leaving that zone with your character for Sanrio Harbour you could and can not return to the Dream Carnival ever again. For months all quests, dialogues and even help-windows were solely available in English language without German and French versions. Together with this new startup-zone some irritating occurences came along: player-characters were fixed at level 35 for the new zone and could not level up there. Skills could be raised but would set back to level 1 when leaving the zone again. Dream-Carnival-mobs dropped recipes (other than the mobs in the main game), but the materials for these were only available in the Dream Carnival. The player-farm on the Dream Carnival was and is merely a "test-farm" and annot be kept. The pinata-quest was bugged from the beginning and still is today in 2012. After a while moles started to show up in the Dream Carnival often and would make player-farms un-usable for a long time each, since the moles were bugged. And they still are - even today. Later on the former game-intro "Dream Rooms" was made into an optional tutorial accessible from the Dream Carnival, but it was and is still bugged, even to the point of deleting items from your inventory. At first you could only keep special tickets from the Dream Carnival to be exchanged for goodies in Sanrio Harbour. Later on it became possible to bring clothes and handheld-items without stats from the Dream Carnival over to Sanrio Land, but only a small amount of that. You would also keep recipes your character had already learned in the Dream Carnival. All money, material, barter items and so on except the speial tickets would just vanish though. The inventory space would be pretty large in the Dream Carnival and would then be reduced as soon as you started the main game in Sanrio Harbour. New players would often complain that they weren't able to leave the Dream Carnival and didn't know why. Obviously the game was patched in the background but did not inform about this. Localized versions for the Dream Carnival in French and German were added only half a year later, although a German translator had finished her work even long before the release of the new zone in April 2010. The reasons for this delay never came to light, but German and French speaking players surely felt the disadvantage. Since that time the German community noticeable dwindled away constantly, as well as the French comm as I heard. Next up: restarting the HKO-Wikia and changes for North American HKO in 2010 Category:Blog posts